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In these days of the World Cup, an article in The Guardian illustrates the ongoing destruction of the world's forests by pointing out that in 2017 the equivalent of one football pitch-sized forest was cut down every second, an astonishing rate of destruction. In total 29.4m hectares of forest disappeared during the year, impacting negatively on climate change and contributing to a possible “sixth mass extinction”.* See:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals One of the main reasons for the clearance of forests in Southeast Asia is for the planting of palm oil. Anyone who has driven through the hectares of palm oil plantations that dominate the landscape in large areas of Malaysian and Indonesia will be aware of how monotonous and sterile the plantations are. Another recent article in The Guardian examines this in some detail. See: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/26/palm-oil-disastrous-for-wildlife-but-here-to-stay-experts-warn An analysis, from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), found that rainforest destruction caused by palm oil plantations damages more than 190 threatened species on the IUCN’s red list, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia. Unfortunately, palm oil is here to stay; it provides a third of the world’s vegetable oil and the alternatives (soy, corn, rapeseed) require even more land than palm oil. The call is, therefore, for a controlled and sustainable planting of oil palm, a policy that governments and producers seemingly often only pay lip-service to. * The Sixth Extinction; An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. Bloomsbury 2014.
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A link to a recent article in the Guardian which focusses on the key points in BirdLife International's report The State of the World's Birds - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/23/one-in-eight-birds-is-threatened-with-extinction-global-study-finds This report is published every five years, and - perhaps predictably given the state of the world we live in - each report tends to describe a worsening situation c.f. the previous report. As Tris Allinson, senior global science officer for BirdLife International notes “The species at risk of extinction were once on mountaintops or remote islands, such as the pink pigeon in Mauritius. Now we’re seeing once widespread and familiar species – European turtle doves, Atlantic puffins and kittiwakes – under threat of global extinction.” Another species which immediately springs to mind to an Hong Kong observer is Yellow-breasted Bunting. This species is, in fact, referred to in the article, a comparison being made with the Passenger Pigeon. The Yellow-breasted Bunting has been hunted/trapped to the verge of extinction. Yet "Hunting and Trapping" is only the fourth most important threat to birds. At the top of the list is "Agriculture" followed by "Logging", although in many cases in the Third World these two are obviously interconnected.
 Great Knot on spring migration A HALT TO RECLAMATION IN THE YELLOW SEA The mud flats on the Yellow Sea make up the most important feeding area for shorebirds on the East Asian - Australasian Flyway. Unfortunately in recent years, to the detriment of the shorebirds, about 70% of the mud flats have been reclaimed. The figures tell their own story: around 90,000 Great Knots have “disappeared” from their Australian wintering grounds; the population of Bar-tailed Godwits wintering in New Zealand has gone from 155,000 in the mid-1990s to 70,000 today. Fortunately, in January 2018 the Chinese government announced a halt to all “business-related” land reclamation along its coasts. Details of this can be found on Terry Townsend’s Birding Beijing site https://birdingbeijing.com/ |